Magazine Re-Designs

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re Magazines: re-designed, re-freshed, re-launched, re-imagined...

US Harper's Bazaar, US ELLE, Lui, Playboy respectively. Love them or hate them or love to hate them, this is the thread to discuss magazine design related news past, present or future.

The ever evolving or in some cases revolving trajectory of print publications, serves as fascinating reflection of our ever accelerating warp-speed, digitally linked world.

For better or for worse, the number of fashion/lifestyle publication redesigns, in just the past 5 years alone, is staggering. Only touching on the tip of the iceberg, a handful of titles "transformed" or tweaked in recent memory:

SELF, W, T The New York Times Style Magazine, NYLON, teenVOGUE, Maxim, UK Harper's Bazaar, German Interview.......!

Editor's Letters, creative staff/masthead changes, cover logo changes, new, original typefaces or more common unearthing of "new" old archival fonts, design critiques, are just some topic ideas. Proper crediting of writers, art directors, designers, photogs is expected whenever possible.

I know there are quite a few graphic design minded members who will have a wealth of insight to share on this topic. I hope this to be an exciting, informative and enlightening cross-referencing resource and thread!

 

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The recent NYT article which provides some context for this Magazine Redesign phenomen:



Makeover Mania: Inside the 21st-century craze for redesigning everything | BY ROB WALKER NOV. 10, 2016

Credit Wheel by Pink Sparrow, based on a concept by Pablo Delcan. Photograph by Henry Leutwyler for The New York Times


1. THE PROBLEM

In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. And so on. The world is, after all, full of problems.

The human desire to solve problems fuels brand-new inventions too: The wheel, for example, eased conveyance significantly. But the redesign tends to address problems with, or caused by, dimensions of the human-designed world, and identifying such problems may be the designer’s most crucial skill. Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem — or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.

As an example in miniature of how the redesign is supposed to work, consider New York’s bike-share program. In 2014, Dani Simons, then the director of marketing for Citi Bike, visited a School of Visual Arts interaction-design class and presented it with a problem to solve. Citi Bike was selling plenty of annual memberships, but it was failing to attract enough “casual” riders, the sorts of one-off users who might rent a bike for just a day or a week. The class went into the field, observing and interviewing people at Citi Bike stations, and at their final meeting, the students presented Simons with their findings — and potential solutions.

Simons was so impressed that she signed two students, Amy Wu and Luke Stern, to a three-month contract that summer. The two of them soon zeroed in on a particularly thorny design problem: the big, instructional decal on Citi Bike’s kiosks. Annual members used a key fob and had no reason to interact with the decal, but it was the gateway for casual users. Consisting mostly of text, the decals were dense and off-putting, especially to tourists uncomfortable with English. Some failed to understand that they were supposed to type in a code from a printed receipt to unlock a bike; instead, they tried to figure out how to insert the receipt itself into a slot on the docking station.

There was another, more prosaic reason that Stern and Wu focused on the decal: It was something they could actually change. Citi Bike is operated by a private firm, but New York’s Transportation Department oversees it, too, and the technology involves an external vendor. The decal, however, was produced in-house. So Stern and Wu proposed refashioning it, using a set of instructional pictograms loosely inspired by Ikea booklets. They tested several prototypes and endured baffled responses from Citi Bike users until eventually landing on a gridlike arrangement of visuals that people found intuitive. Simons and the Transportation Department signed off on a final version, and it was installed on the city’s 300-plus Citi Bike stations. Wu checked the service’s publicly available user data a month later and discovered that casual ridership had increased about 14 percent. “It was a little bit surreal,” Stern recalls. “We can actually make a difference.”

Indeed, this is the platonic ideal of the redesign: A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard — all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.


This hunger for change has been a boon for firms like IDEO. Tim Brown, the company’s president and chief executive, has overseen IDEO’s steady expansion from product design to interactive and service design for businesses like Bank of America and Microsoft, and in more recent years even for municipalities and governments. He has been a vocal proponent of the idea that “design thinking” can be applied to just about any problem. “There are two takes on the redesign,” Brown says. “The glass-half-empty take on redesign is, ‘Oh, we’re unnecessarily redesigning a chair,’ or a lamp, or whatever.”

 

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The glass-half-full take requires a broader perspective: “The need to redesign is really dependent on how fit for purpose the thing in question is,” Brown says. In his thinking, much of our world is built around systems designed to respond to the social structures and technologies of the industrial age. Everything from systems of education and health care to the design of cities and modes of transportation, he says, all trace their roots to a drastically different era and ought to be fundamentally rethought for the one we live in now. “I think we’ve potentially never been in a period of history where there are so many things that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says. “And therefore the idea of redesign is entirely appropriate, I think — even though it’s extremely difficult.”



2. WHAT TO CHANGE

You don’t have to listen to Karim Rashid for very long to get a sense that he thinks pretty much every single manifestation of the built environment needs to be redesigned. Known for his colorful personal and professional style, he has had a long run as one of the most famous industrial designers in America. He believes design is a fundamentally social act that makes the world a better place. But it is also, he points out, a business. So in practice, most redesigns begin with a client; without one, not much happens. He has worked with many of them — on furniture, packaging, gadgets, housewares, luxury goods, even condos and hotels. But he has learned that even having a client does not guarantee that any given redesign will ever make it out of renderings and prototypes and into the real world. “People say I’m prolific,” he says. “Can you imagine if all the other stuff got to go to market?”

As Rashid sees it, so many of the things that surround us bear cumbersome vestiges of the past. “The world is full of this kind of kitsch history — history that has nothing to do with the world we live in now,” he says. He points to a redesign project of his that fizzled, a complete rethinking of the business-class tableware for Delta Air Lines. His proposal was bold: His bowls had sharp angles that echoed Delta’s triangular logo, his trays had subtle recesses that anchored dishes in place and his wineglasses skipped the stem in favor of a tapered shape with a wide base.

“The stem on a wineglass is meaningless,” Rashid says. He dismisses the conventional argument that it prevents the drinker’s hand from interfering with wine’s ideal temperature; to have the slightest such effect, he claims, you’d have to wrap your palm around the bowl for 20 straight minutes. The stem is actually a leftover artifact, he says, from centuries ago, when goblets made of metal had high stems to signal status and wealth. This design quirk remained after we switched to glass, Rashid says. Making wineglasses look a certain way because that’s how they have always looked is a classic example of privileging form over function. “I’m sitting in first class or business class on an airplane with turbulence,” Rashid says, “with a wineglass with a stem on it — do you understand? It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”

His proposed redesigns were striking, but they had to pass muster with the service-item maker, the flight attendants’ union and Delta itself — which ultimately declined to move forward with the concepts Rashid proposed. “It was all rejected,” he tells me, with a sigh. “Because it doesn’t look like domestic tableware.”


Rashid loves to “break archetypes,” in effect redesigning a whole object category. But the hurdles to doing so involve practicality as well as taste. More recently, he designed the Solarin mobile phone for Sirin Labs. It is equipped with extreme encryption capabilities and made with wealthy, privacy-obsessed customers in mind. It costs an eye-popping $12,000 and up. The client had a sky’s-the-limit attitude about imbuing the phone with a truly distinct form.

Rashid proposed an oval shape. “It would fit perfectly in your hand,” he says. His concept made it to prototype, and “everybody loved the oval phone.” But it turned out that only a handful of factories do smartphone glass assembly, and none were willing to retool an entire production line to accommodate a relatively small client. Moreover, existing operating systems are all designed to work in a grid format. The phone ended up with pronounced beveling at the edges, but was still fundamentally a rectangle. “I was so, so disappointed,” Rashid says. “I tried every trick.” Sounding almost wistful, he recalls a similar misadventure: an oval-shaped television set he designed for Samsung. “They showed it in some focus group, and it bombed,” he says, laughing. “People didn’t like the idea of an oval television. I have no idea why.”

 

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3. WHAT TO KEEP

I know why. And really, so does Rashid. As much as we are attracted to the new, we simultaneously cling to the familiar. This tension means that some redesigns — particularly in the realm of graphic design — can inspire surprisingly visceral public backlash. Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram updated its logo and app icon, simplifying the design and making it more colorful. The chorus of online moaning and mockery that followed grew so loud that it was actually reported on by The Times, which called it a “freak out.” Instagram didn’t budge, but a similar backlash in 2010 caused the Gap to retract plans for a new logo it had floated online. The University of California pulled back key elements of a redesign that met with a similarly furious response.

Probably the most notorious and consequential example involved Tropicana. In 2009, the brand rolled out a new look that included a full redesign of its familiar packaging and visual identity, dropping its orange-with-a-straw-in it logo — corny, perhaps, but very familiar — for a more stylish icon and a sans-serif type treatment. Fans howled online, but that probably mattered less than the reported 20 percent drop in retail sales. The redesign was withdrawn, and the brand went back to its old look.

Situations like this can unnerve clients, and this knowledge was certainly relevant to Mastercard when it decided this year to update its logo for the first time in more than 20 years. Raja Rajamannar, the global chief marketing and communications officer, says that the first parameter he gave his designer, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, “was not to mess things up.” The online crowd can get “pretty nasty,” he explains. “We don’t want to get mired in unnecessary controversy and negativity.”

This conservatism among clients can frustrate designers. “I was kind of brought up in this tradition that, you know, there’s nothing more inspiring than the blank slate, the open brief,” Bierut says. But over the years he has come to appreciate the challenge of “starting with a given,” particularly now.


“The last big period of redesign was the postwar era,” Bierut says. “There was this mania to make older companies look new and modern.” As a more corporate world emerged, the visual vernacular of mom-and-pop businesses looked quaint, and so design shifted from an emphasis on manufacturing things to selling more abstract forms of value. A railroad doesn’t run trains, the thinking went; it provides transportation — so instead of a representation of a locomotive, its more modern logo might rely on arrows and italic typography. More broadly, idiosyncratic or hand-drawn lettering gave way to stylized and minimal iconography and type treatments that projected far-flung and trustworthy power. “Corporate design was done as a command-and-control exercise,” he says, resulting in a master solution laid out in “a thick binder” prescribing how every branding element would appear.

By the ’80s and ’90s, that approach started to feel dated, suspicious and at odds with a vogue for more agile management theories. So in the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of redesigns as companies have repositioned themselves in a more globalized, technologized marketplace. Mastercard is one of many examples of a company looking to update visual strategies designed with billboards and brick-and-mortar stores in mind for the age of social media and a transnational customer base.

The payment giant’s top priority in revisiting its logo for the first time in decades: Don’t mess it up. The result, released earlier this year, is a version of the familiar interlocked-circles symbol streamlined for the digital era



Nevertheless, the specific dimensions of Mastercard’s “don’t mess it up” parameter included keeping the interlocking circles — one red, one yellow — that the brand has used for more than half a century. Bierut believes that this was wise: Unlike a book cover or a poster, a brand mark is “more like a building,” he says. “You don’t unveil it thinking it’s going to work once and then be on its way. It’s supposed to accrue value the longer it’s invested in.” The raw familiarity that builds up over years, which marketers refer to as “equity,” probably plays a bigger factor in our assessment of a supposedly great logo design than we realize. Bierut is tickled, for instance, by how many people seem to admire Target’s logo. “I can’t imagine if you went to your client whose name was Target and said, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ then you went away for a few weeks and came back with a circle with a dot in the middle, and an invoice,” he says. “The client would be skeptical — and the world at large would destroy you.”

 

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For Mastercard, Pentagram got as creative as the brief allowed, offering dozens of yellow-and-red-circle variations — adding additional colors to suggest inclusivity, or a superminimal take presenting only the outlines of the interlocked rings. Rajamannar (and others at Mastercard, crosschecked by multiple rounds of market research) passed on those, opting for a treatment that amounted to a kind of reiteration of the existing mark. The colors became a little brighter, a set of stripes in their overlap was eliminated in favor of a single orange-y color and the name moved below the circles. Ultimately, in fact, the new symbol is designed to be able to stand alone, with no name at all; Rajamannar says testing conducted across 11 countries found 81 percent of respondents recognized the wordless version of the logo as Mastercard’s.

In short, the not-messing-it-up mission was deemed a success — and there was no notable backlash. “This kind of brand mark has become more ubiquitous than the designers of the ’60s and ’70s ever would have dreamed,” Bierut says, and that may explain a public interest in design that would have been a shock in that era. It should not be so surprising today; the design profession has been on a decades-long mission to have its work taken seriously across the culture. But now, having achieved what they wanted, many designers seem to wish the public would be more deferential — something Bierut finds amusing. “If designers claim to want people to be interested and invested in and care about design,” he says, “they sort of have to accept that interest on the terms of, you know, the audience.”

4. WHERE TO COMPROMISE

In 2011, Jamie Siminoff had just sold a start-up and was spending most of his days in his garage in Pacific Palisades, Calif., determined to come up with a new business concept. Tinkering with ideas including a gardening business and new conference-call technology, he soon became annoyed, because he could never hear his doorbell, and he kept missing visitors. So he “hacked together” a system that linked the bell to his phone. His wife told him that it was far more useful than the notions he was chasing in the garage. The idea evolved to include a camera and a motion detector — and thus the ability to monitor your front door from anywhere, with a smartphone, making the object as much about security as convenience.


The product he ended up with, Ring, is a good example of a broader phenomenon in the world of industrial design. The technology shifts that Brown and Rashid cite have quickened the pace of redesigns in more mundane, less grandiose ways. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors, circuit boards, cameras and other components, practically every consumer good now seems susceptible to reinvention as a “smart object.” Even the path Siminoff traveled from concept to design was made easier by technology and start-up mania, first with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign, then with an unsuccessful but profile-raising appearance on “Shark Tank.”

Sometimes such a path results in a version of what the tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — starting with a supposed breakthrough and then seeking out a supposed problem that it can hypothetically solve. And at times the presumed innovations in these tech-centric redesigns seem to run well ahead of their potential privacy and security pitfalls. (“Yes,” the tech site Motherboard reported last year, “your smart dildo can be hacked.”) But sometimes it results in a hit, like the widely celebrated update of the thermostat in internet-connected, app-controlled form created by the start-up Nest, which was ultimately bought by Google for $3.2 billion.

By his own account, Siminoff’s first stab at the product was a bit off. He called it Doorbot, and its look matched the geeky name: a vaguely sci-fi, curved object with a camera concealed by a spooky, bulbous protrusion. “That was the pride of the design,” Siminoff says now, laughing. He prototyped it in his garage with a couple of recent college graduates; none of them had a design background. The marketplace set him straight, he says: “No one wanted this big HAL 9000 thing on the front door.” He still believed in the object’s utility, but he realized he would need to redesign his redesign.

Siminoff found his way to Chris Loew, an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, with a long record in technology hardware; he worked on early versions of tablet products and spent 16 years at IDEO helping clients including Samsung and Oral-B. In more recent years he has been hired by a number of start-ups. Impressed by Siminoff, Loew also recognized the issues with Doorbot. “It was very gadgety,” he says, wryly. “You didn’t know if you were being shot with radiation or — you know, it’s not offensive, but you didn’t know what it was.” In short, it didn’t look like a doorbell, and even the most impressive technical capabilities have to be presented in a form that makes sense to the consumer.


RING DOORBELL
The original version of this reimagined doorbell (equipped with a camera and intercom) had such a sci-fi look that visitors often didn’t know what it was. A redesign of that redesign has placed it in the realm of functional home décor — and it has been installed in hundreds of thousands of homes.

Credit Gear Shift
In this case, that meant a design that resonated with basic home architecture. There were already serious technologized constraints: It had to accommodate a fairly large battery, a camera, a circuit board and a motion detector that required an opening of a specific size. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, the architectural setting imposed limits that might not apply to a free-standing product: Nobody really wants to tack a wild experiment in product design to a front door. Loew settled on a rectangular shape that would visually echo molding. “Everybody’s house is really just extruded shapes and planar shapes,” says Loew, who is now Ring’s lead product designer. The product comes in various finishes informed by classic door hardware, and is meant to be notable but not flashy.

The company has grown to 500 employees, with hundreds of thousands of installations already done. The only holdover from Doorbot is a circle around the button that glows blue when pressed.

 

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5. WHEN TO START OVER

Sometimes the route to a successful redesign leads directly through a decision about what problem not to solve. A few years ago, for instance, an entrepreneur named Richard Smiedt approached Karim Rashid with an idea for a set of travel bags and cases that could be used individually or fit together, according to the needs of any given trip. Recently, in a conference room in Rashid’s Manhattan offices, Smiedt clicked through a set of slides depicting the various ideas the designer had come up with over the course of their many collaborations.


“A lot of what you get with Karim,” he said, gesturing at a shelf full of Rashid-designed products and their curves and skewed lines and loud colors, “is this, reinvented.” He paused to clarify his point: “I totally want what he’s done. I just don’t want it to look like any specific thing that he’s done.”

Smiedt paused on one image of a carry-on bag with a side pocket containing a flask-shaped plastic bottle outfitted with a strong microfilter. This accessory popped up during the luggage-design process as a useful alternative to buying bottled water after every airport security check. “So no matter what country,” Rashid explained, “I go across and to the bathroom and fill it up with clean water. Because it’s absurd, this idea of drinking bottled water — the landfill is enormous, 18 million bottles are thrown away a day in America.” Both men immediately saw its appeal. Smiedt promptly “disappeared,” Rashid continued, “and six months later came back and said: ‘You know, forget the luggage. We’re doing the water bottle.’ ”

On its own, the flasklike form seemed off, so Smiedt pushed for alternatives, something more like what was on Rashid’s product shelf — but not exactly. An hourglass-like, squeezable shape that Rashid eventually dreamed up was perfect. But it required making a lengthy search to find a capable manufacturer — “Nobody had made a blow-molded bottle that was thinner in the middle,” Smiedt said — and committing to a huge production order for the product, which they called Bobble.

“Companies are often risk-averse,” Smiedt continued, “and don’t get design’s possibilities. But designers do what they want to design, and it often doesn’t connect with the consumer,” at least not the mass scale he had in mind. “For me,” he concluded, “the key to design is that it can’t polarize.” Many designers would recoil from that assertion, but as a mass-market-oriented entrepreneur, Smiedt’s goals are different. He thinks a lot about who is not going to like a new take on a useful object, as a way to “get to something that’s really understood.”



BOBBLE BOTTLE

This new take on the reusable water bottle started out as an accessory to a luggage redesign. The luggage was scuttled — but Bobble, with a distinct shape and a strong microfilter, has sold millions.

BOBBLE BOTTLE
This new take on the reusable water bottle started out as an accessory to a luggage redesign. The luggage was scuttled — but Bobble, with a distinct shape and a strong microfilter, has sold millions.

Credit Karim Rashid

The Bobble bottle sold 15 million units in its first three years on the market. Smiedt sold Bobble to Seventh Generation and has gone back into business with Rashid, this time in a partnership. They want to redesign more travel-related accessories, so they started by dumping their luggage onto a table and talking about what they carried, and what they needed. Their first idea involved finding a way to keep smeary touch-controlled gadgets clean. Rashid designed a travel-size spray bottle, arriving at an elliptical form, more like a worry stone than a bottle. They both loved the object’s shape and feel but wondered about the breadth of its appeal. Ultimately, they shelved it, though not entirely.

They went back to the results of the bag-dump experiment and zeroed in on the most bothersome objects: the dull-colored, blocky, careless-looking power adapters and portable chargers and their various entangled wires. What if you combined a wall charger and mobile battery in a single object? What if it had a more appealing aesthetic? Smiedt sourced the technology, and Rashid designed around it to create an object they called Bump. Sifting through a box of prototypes, Smiedt pointed out that this completely different product has almost the same elliptical shape as the discarded cleaner idea. This “fun” form (it comes in magenta, red, black and blue) will carry through the entire product line, he explained. Rashid also devised a matching cable, and a clever silicone sleeve that is used both to store the cable and to protect Bump when it’s tossed into a bag.

Of course, there was a hitch. Market testing found that consumers were often happy to use Bump with the (less attractive) power cable they already owned, and didn’t bother with the sleeve. So as Bump goes on sale online and rolls out across big retailers, starting with the Container Store in late October, the cord is now sold separately. And that clever silicone sleeve may also be sold separately — or it may be on its way to a prototype box somewhere.

 

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6. THE SOLUTION

All redesigns have something in common: They end. This does not happen at the moment the redesigned symbol, object or interface is implemented. It happens when that redesign is replaced. Maybe that’s the lofty logic of progress, or just the workaday logic of capitalism. But it’s certainly the logic of the redesign, and perhaps design in general, in the early 21st century. When IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about updating all that is not “fit for purpose” today, he’s talking about entire systems, not just their individual and tangible components and manifestations.

IDEO started out as an industrial-design firm working on consumer products; it expanded further into interaction design as the digital world took hold, and then it went into services. Now its projects include “redesigning” such abstractions as the school lunch (for the city of San Francisco) or the vote (for Los Angeles County), experimenting with how to lace in 21st-century technology elements and shed out-of-date practices. These are incremental efforts that play out over years. There is no momentous before-and-after unveiling, just a continuous process of researching, trying and replacing ideas. This, after all, is how designers work: in an ongoing system of study, hunches, prototypes, tests and do-overs.

The inevitability of re-redesign is something that Amy Wu (now part of a Microsoft design team in San Francisco) and Luke Stern (now a designer for Intersection, a firm focused on civic spaces) encountered in their work for Citi Bike. A few months after the triumphant installation of their redesigned kiosk decals, the company that operated Citi Bike was bought by another bike-share operator, Motivate, which runs similar programs for several other cities. They got an email from Citi Bike saying they might be needed again, but then never heard back.

The new owner promptly set about a broader upgrade of Citi Bike’s system involving new software and changes to the hardware in those kiosks. This meant that the decals needed to be redesigned yet again. The new ones incorporated some of Wu and Stern’s thinking, but in a new look that, among other things, visually announced to the world that Citi Bike had been updated.

Stern and Wu are philosophical about this turn. “The logistics had changed,” Stern says. “They had to update the system. Our design wasn’t actually relevant any more. That’s reality, right?” Right. And it was certainly a useful final lesson for an effort that started out as a student project: All redesigns end, but the redesign never does.



Rob Walker writes the Workologist column for The Times.

 

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Alex Wiederin, currently executive design director for Town & Country, named Creative Director for Esquire


By TNM Staff | 177 days ago | SHARE THIS | Facebook | 0 Tweet


Hearst Magazuines’s Esquire also adds Anton Ioukhnovets as Design Director, and editor Maximillian Potter joins as Editor at Large


NEW YORK, NY – July 19, 2016 – Jay Fielden, Esquire editor-in-chief and Town & Country editorial director, today announced three new additions to the Esquire staff. Alex Wiederin, currently executive design director for Town & Country, will add to his role the additional title of creative director for Esquire. Anton Ioukhnovets has been named design director, and award-winning writer and editor Maximillian Potter joins as editor at large. All three start in their new roles in August and will report to


“Alex and Anton will shape the look of Esquire, refining the experience of the magazine in a way that touches our rich history and reaches to the future,” Fielden said. “I’ve worked with Alex at Town & Country, and he is a tremendous talent, with a profound sense of how images and design complement and enhance great journalism. Anton is a gifted designer whose varied experience will bring depth and new ideas. Max is a writer I’ve long admired, and adding him to our growing list of contributors adds even more literary mojo to our stellar team. As editor at large, he will also be helping to bring in stories and writers.”


In his newly created Esquire role, Alex Wiederin will work closely with Fielden to shape the overall look and feel of Esquire as he continues to do at Town & Country as executive design director, a position he has held since 2014.

Wiederin is the founder and creative director of Buero New York, a global creative agency and multidisciplinary design studio serving high-end global brands from the worlds of fashion, beauty, luxury and publishing.

Previously, he held creative director positions at ELLE Italia, Vogue Hommes International, 10 Magazine, Glamour Italy, and BIG, worked on a redesign of Dazed & Confused, and co-founded AnOther Magazine.

Wiederin has worked with fashion brands including Valentino, Versace, Givenchy, Missoni, Jill Stuart, Carolina Herrera, Nina Ricci, Vivienne Westwood, and Kenzo.

Throughout his career, he has collaborated with the world’s most influential and visionary photographers including Helmut Newton, Nick Knight, Steve McCurry, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, David Sims, and Mario Sorrenti.


Anton Ioukhnovets has been the creative director of the eponymous firm Ioukhnovets Design since 2010, where his clients include The New York Times Magazine, Time Inc., Random House, and Germany’s Achtung Mode.

He was also creative director for Bloomberg Pursuits from 2012 to 2014. Prior to that, he was design director for W and creative director of Lotus Magazine, the custom publication for Lotus cars.

Earlier in his career, Ioukhnovets spent seven years at GQ, three of them as an art director. In 2011, the GQ design team won the “Best Design” National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. He is also the recipient of numerous awards from the Society of Publication Designers.


Maximillian Potter has been an award-winning staff writer/editor for GQ, Premiere, Philadelphia and Details, and a contributor to Outside and Vanity Fair. For nearly a decade, he was executive editor of Denver’s city magazine, 5280, a six-time National Magazine Awards finalist. Potter’s first piece for Vanity Fair won the 2012 Deadline Club Award for “Feature Writing” and grew into his first book, Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine, published in 2014.

From 2013 to 2015, Potter served as senior media adviser and speechwriter to Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and, in 2014, was a senior adviser to the governor in his successful reelection campaign. Potter left Hickenlooper’s staff to co-author the governor’s memoir, The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics, a critically acclaimed bestseller published in May 2016.

In addition to being a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in the categories of “Public Interest” and “Reporting,” his writing has received accolades including the Military Reporters & Editors “First Place” and the “Silver Gavel,” the American Bar Association’s highest recognition for legal reporting. Potter was a fellow at the Knight Digital Media Center’s Multimedia Program at UCLA, Berkeley, and his magazine writing has been included in several Best American anthologies, most recently, Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.


talkingmedia.com

 

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Esquire Takes Shape Under Jay Fielden


Jay Fielden's first issue of Esquire will hit newsstands on May 31.

By Alexandra Steigrad on May 25, 2016


Jay Fielden’s Esquire is coming into focus.


Although the June/July issue, which hits newsstands on May 31, isn’t the finished product — Fielden said his Esquire is still “evolving” — it does provide a glimpse at of what readers can expect from the editor down the line.

“These are hints of things to come,” said Fielden, flipping over the issue to reveal the cover, featuring actor Viggo Mortensen, along with a bolder “Esquire” logo and tagline “Rebels & Renegades.”

“The subtext of this title — of this theme — ‘rebels and renegades,’ is kind of to make a statement about the spirit of the Esquire that I love the most, that shows you the rules you should break, not the ones you should follow,” he said. “That’s the spirit. That’s a key change in tone and feel.”

The theme holds true for the “zeitgeist moment” that we’re in, the editor said, referring specifically to the presidential race. Aside from Mortensen, the issue features 27 examples of men from different generations and backgrounds that embody Fielden’s theme. They include Kendrick Lamar, Pope Francis, Dave Chapelle, Harvey Weinstein, Henry Kissinger, Phillip Roth and John McEnroe.

With such a broad sampling of men — who then is exactly Fielden’s target consumer? Who is the Esquire man?

The editor hesitated to answer that — no one wants to dismiss potential readers — especially as magazine readership is under pressure. Instead, he gave a more academic answer about Esquire’s importance as a “cultural” magazine, which “at its best,” can “direct a conversation” and appeal to both men and women.

He brought in a slate of new writers — male and female — in order to achieve that. They include Dwight Garner, John Lahr, Terry McDonell, Jay McInerney, Katie Roiphe and Lisa DePaulo.

In terms of stories, Fielden noted that he’s looking to investigative stories and first person narratives to help deliver that “umph” and nod to the magazine’s heritage of weighty long-form journalism and insightful, humorous essays.

In the summer issue, Fielden pointed to a feature exploring the potential construction of Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. Written by John H. Richardson, the story examines if it would be possible to construct such a wall, logistically and financially.

“It turns out it is not possible,” said Fielden, who commissioned a design team to produce an eerie computer-generated image of the wall to accompany Richardson’s feature.

source | wwd.com

 

[ellastica]

continued


In terms of fashion, Fielden, who had been editor in chief of both Men’s Vogue (shuttered in 2008), and Esquire sibling, Town & Country where he now serves as editorial director, said he’s “amping up” the coverage.

But, don’t expect elaborate, glossy fashion shoots and typical market pages. Instead, the editor is trading off Esquire’s journalistic heritage to tell fashion stories.

In the current issue that translates to a story on how to wear a black suit without “looking like a limo driver,” he said, and a spread on sneakers, depicting the evolution of the fashion sneaker over time as worn by stylish men.

“To me, Esquire at its heart is a magazine that has tried to understand the world through writing,” he said. “The imperative is to talk about fashion in a journalistic way.”

But making fashion relevant to readers who may not consider themselves “fashion guys,” isn’t far from how other men’s magazines approach the topic.

While GQ, the other big men’s magazine in the space, takes a more fashion-first approach, it is still largely seen as Esquire’s main competitor in the erratic men’s space.

With Fielden’s background, not to mention his recent hire of ex-GQ editor at large Michael Hainey as executive director of editorial, it appears that Esquire is gunning to grab market share.

When asked about that and GQ as Esquire’s primary competitor, Fielden said defensively: “Number one is, GQ is a supplement of Esquire in terms of who’s [preceding] whom, let’s be genealogically correct.”

“What I think is, these are very different magazines. I truly think that. I think they think that,” he continued. “If you look at what this is going to become and the kind of tack they’re taking [is] that they are for very different readers.”

While Esquire publisher Jack Essig agreed, he did note that he will now have a greater chance with Fielden to grab ad dollars in the grooming, watches and autos space.

Fielden said he is still in the process of making changes, but a hasty redesign won’t be one of them.

“I think it would be disrespectful and would undermine the weight of the institution,” he said, offering that since his predecessor, David Granger, left at the end of March, the magazine has already undergone a “fairly refreshed approach.”
And as for masthead shakeups — Fielden hasn’t had too much of that yet.

“It takes a while to get the caliber of people who can create the team. I am aware of that,” Fielden said, while flipping through a stack of old Esquire assignment cards for writers ranging from Dylan Thomas and Dorothy Parker to Tom Wolfe, William Faulkner and Truman Capote, who was paid $25,000 for his tell-all “La Côte Basque, 1965.”

“For true change to take root and harden into a clear and consistent vision, it’s going to take a little time,” he said. “You set the bar high. You don’t do that by September. You do part of that by September. You set the bar over the course of a period of time where you can actually achieve it, and we will. ”


source: wwd.com

 

[ellastica]

Esquire covers June/July 2016 through November 2016

EIC Jay Fielden
CD Alex Wiederin
DD Anton Iouknovets


Esquire US June/July 2016
Star: Viggo Mortenseon
Photographer: Marc Hom

credit maimon | source esquire.com


Esquire US August 2016
Star: Liev Schreiber
Photographer: Cedric Buchet

credit IndigoHomme | source esquire.com



Esquire US September 2016
Star: Clint & Scott Eastwood
Photographer: Terry Richardson

credit Scotty | source Digital Edition


Esquire US October 2016
Star: Ewan MacGregor
Photographer: Dusan Reljin

credit Scotty | source Esquire Digital


Esquire US November 2016
Star: Matthew McConaughey
Photographer: Pamela Hanson

credit zzzyao76 | source Esquire Digital

 

[ellastica]

Esquire Contributors Page | August 2016 | September 2016 | November 2016


Esquire Design Assitant: Ivana Cruz






source: ivanacruz.com

 

[kimair]

liz tilberis/fabien baron, 1992

kate betts/michael grossman, 2001

glenda bailey/stephen gan, 2002

glenda bailey/robin derrick of spring studio/stephen gan, 2012

Putting Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover of a fashion magazine is hardly a groundbreaking move. But featuring the back of her head, as Harper's Bazaar does on the subscribers' cover of their March issue — well, that's certainly something new. “It’s a very daring thing to do, where you don’t immediately see her face," Glenda Bailey told WWD. The cover is part of magazine's big new redesign, which also includes new fonts (Didot Caps, Didot Italics, and Gotham, should you be interested), a larger overall size (by one inch), new section names (they now mostly begin with the, as in "The List"), and thicker paper. WWD likens the changes to major plastic surgery: "It’s like the party guest who you recognize when she enters the room, but you know she’s had work done — a lot of work."

There's also some changes in the magazine's content, including more beauty coverage (ten pages instead of four in every issue), a new travel section ("The Escape"), a monthly "Best-Dressed" column by Derek Blasberg (previously just an online feature), and less focus on celebrities. Other things to look forward to in the March issue: an article about Sarah Palin by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, and 24 hours in the life of Tom Ford.

(via nymag.com/thecut)

harpersbazaar.com, scanned by vogue28, popsugar.com, if it's hip, it's here

 

[ellastica]

^ thanks kimair I had this HB redesign in the queue.


Looking back on the original thread for the March 2012 issue, this relaunch generated very little buzz amongst avid magazine forum regulars. While the redesign was full of good intention, no amount of mediocre design can make-up for trite, irrelevant writing, weak fashion editing and overall lack of voice and vision.


Case in point, their big reveal: "The List." Ground-breaking: Gaudy gold fashion accessories, crammed together between a bunch of italicized, hard to read text. The written word is all fashion cliches which in no way specifically highlights details of the so-called "objects of desire." Unremarkable still-life photography, vague cliched product descriptions, poor typeface choices, no white space, and horrible fashion accessories selection, editing. This page misses the mark on all points: layout, font, photography, editing and writing. Not to mention was this in anyway forward thinking or simply mirroring what's already out there?

credit kokurox | source wwd.com

 

[ellastica]

The very nature of Subscribers covers implies LOW risk, regardless of how "daring" the cover reads to already hooked subscribers. Now had Glenda run the Subscribers cover as the Newsstand cover, that would've been truely daring AND risk-taking, thanks to the combined effect of obscured face, racy leg reveal, minimal text.

Whatever happened with their dubious claim of "less focus on celebrities" ? The beauty features pages were tacky, nauseating celebrity shout outs. Take Madonna's latest Bazaar cover issue...

Last I remember Glenda gave us Rita friggin Wilson in place of respected fashion journalists such as Sarah Mower and rather than spotlighting up and coming fashion talent we got over-exposed celebrities of the fashion design world in comical situations.

Glenda Bailey clutched the magazine close to her chest, like a Giants running back about to charge the Patriots’ defensive line. It was the first copy of the first redesign of Harper’s Bazaar in a decade, and she was understandably possessive of it.

“Let’s wait a minute,” said Bazaar’s editor in chief, taking a seat in an otherwise empty conference room on the 16th floor of Hearst Tower. “I just returned from the collections. How are you?”

The March issue finally lands on the table and it’s the cover that subscribers will receive. It shows a leggy blonde, wearing a skin-baring, long black dress from relatively new designer Anthony Vaccarello. Her long, wavy hair is covering her face. Is that a model?

“It’s Gwyneth Paltrow,” Bailey proclaimed. “It’s a very daring thing to do, where you don’t immediately see her face.” Bailey added, “As you know, I was the first to develop this two-cover approach.”

Here’s how the new Harper’s Bazaar can be summed up: it’s like the party guest who you recognize when she enters the room, but you know she’s had work done — a lot of work.

The magazine is larger by one inch, the paper quality is noticeably thicker and there is new cover typography. Inside the issue, the pages look less cluttered and thrown together, with more white space, while sections are more tightly edited. So far, there’s less celebrity and the related popcorn stories that can come with that. But in some ways, it still feels like the old Harper’s Bazaar. The black logo is the same. The emphasis is still on high fashion.

“It’s going to take a while to get through it,” Bailey said with some pride, paging through all the advertisements in the front of the book. “It’s up 15.5 percent in ad pages, you know. We’re going to be here for a while.”

These are the results of new publisher Carol Smith, who has called March her first issue even though she joined last May. The turnaround in March ad pages is significant. The prior year, ad pages fell 12 percent, to 235. New advertisers include Tom Ford Fashion, Hervé Léger, David Webb, Alberta Ferretti, Alexis Bittar, RéVive, Nexxus and Lucky Brand.

But while the redesign gives Smith and Bailey a new tale to tell, Bazaar still has a lot of ground to make up — it remains the fourth fashion title in terms of ad pages, behind Vogue, InStyle and Elle.

Bailey landed on the first new section, “The List.” Almost every new section starts with the word “the.”

“This is the ultimate list of things to be aware of this month,” Bailey said. Paltrow has also produced a list of her own, “The A List.” Next up, the first of several “exclusives,” in the issue, beginning with a bracelet from Cartier that was originally designed by the brand in the Seventies. Editors at the magazine had been asking about it for years and it’s been reissued. “It really will be the must-have piece,” she said.

A few more tidbits from the issue: Derek Blasberg’s “Best-Dressed List,” an online feature, has become a monthly magazine column. Another story covers 24 hours with Tom Ford. He woke up at 4:30 a.m., took four baths and ate two doughnuts. The beauty section has been expanded, from four pages to 10 in every issue. Bailey has introduced a monthly travel section, “The Escape.” She plans to report on more news every month, to include the latest on art, film, books and trends. And she has kept the monthly feature “Fabulous at Every Age.” Bailey has even expanded upon it, in the beauty section.

Terry Richardson, a longtime contributor, photographed Paltrow for the cover. Karl Lagerfeld, Dan Jackson and Karim Sadli also shot features in the issue. Artist Liu Bolin painted designers including Alber Elbaz and Angela Missoni. “I just saw Alber and he told me there is still paint on his glasses,” Bailey added.

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann wrote a piece about Sarah Palin, pegged to the HBO movie of “Game Change,” based on their book. Lisa DePaulo has a piece about Stephanie Mack, the daughter-in-law of Bernie Madoff, while Vicky Ward wrote about Bernard-Henri Lévy.

When plans for the redesign were revealed in November, many observers were surprised to hear Robin Derrick, former creative director of British Vogue, was hired to consult. He ended up spending about a month on the project, not just working on the magazine but also on all of Bazaar’s social media. Later this year, the magazine will launch e-commerce — the latest move in the ongoing transformation of magazines from merely editorial and advertising vehicles to brands that literally sell the products they cover. “We’ve started to redesign online and we will see that continue,” Bailey added.

She said the new design approach can be summed in one sentence: “It is Ditto Caps, Ditto Italics and also an introduction of Gotham,” she said, talking typography and taking the magazine back into her hands.

A reporter asked if she could take the issue with her. Bailey replied: “I wish you could but I’m afraid you can’t. These are extremely rare. The team hasn’t even got a copy yet.”

With that, Bailey took hold of the issue and headed to the elevator. The fashion world will have to wait until it hits newsstands on Feb. 14 to see the new look.

credit kokurox | source wwd.com

 

[ellastica]

Does anyone know how a redesign such as this, at US Bazaar impacts international editions, if at all? Does it come down to budget, how much a particular international edition deviates or stays true to the original editorial content?


The 12th Anniversary Edition
Harper's Bazaar Indonesia June 2012
Photographer: Terry Richardson
Cover star: Gwyneth Paltrow
Stylist: Andrew richardson
Hair: Marc Lopez
Make-up: Emma Lovell


Perhaps garish color for some but I prefer this reprint over the US Bazaar cover.

credit djowodjp30 | source scoop Digital Magazine

 

[blueorchid]

I honestly forgot that Bazaar was redesigned!!!

 

[ellastica]

Last I checked, more white space, otherwise HB reveted back to their old antics

 

[MON]

Vogue Paris underwent a lot of redesigns in just under 2 editors (4 of which being under Alt's helm). I kinda like the design now tbh

 

[ellastica]

Déjà vu. Didn't Lee already redesign this mag when she took over?

Speaking of researched editorial content, where are the interviews and 2 cents of the the allure art department, visuals team, conspicuously missing. Are they not presumably undertaking the allure magazine 'refresh'?


A telling quote which seems to define and drive the current revolving door aesthetic mindset plaguing print in the digital age and our Insta-culture at large: short attention spans & boredom.

“With magazines in general, you have standard departments, story formats — as an editor it’s easy to get stuck in that,” Lee said. “Eventually, it can get really boring"

Allure Magazine Rolling Out New Editorial Look

As one of the few beauty books in a struggling print market, Allure is looking at a “refresh” to keep it relevant for years to come.

By Kali Hays on January 14, 2019

Allure is gearing up to unveil a new look to its magazine and digital properties, but don’t call it a relaunch.

Michelle Lee, the magazine’s editor in chief for nearly three years, prefers to think of upcoming changes, which have been in the works for months and will roll out fully with the upcoming March issue, in terms like “refresh” and “evolution.”

“With magazines in general, you have standard departments, story formats — as an editor it’s easy to get stuck in that,” Lee said. “Eventually, it can get really boring. I always want to keep things fresh.”

For Allure — recently the subject of plenty of industry chatter speculating its demise in print as its publisher Condé Nast has continued to shrink its operations, slate of print publications and budgets, overall — its “evolution” nevertheless means a number of changes are on the way.


There will be a new typeface for the magazine; younger and more diverse photographers coming in for shoots; a more “beauty forward” approach to editorial content; a dedicated wellness section for the first time; a page called “Cult Object” is coming back after being cut a few years ago; Lee will have her own “My Favorite Product” page, and a series on vanities and bathrooms called “Beauty Spaces” is coming in as the new back page. Lee used words like “crisp,” “bright” and “fresh” to describe the look of what’s coming and said she sat down with her editorial team last year “to take a step back, to think about in 2019, who do we want to work with?”

“The world of media has changed so much, the world of beauty and celebrity and Hollywood has changed so much, so I wanted to say, visually, ‘Where should we go?’”

Lee agreed beauty is an industry that’s taken to social media unlike any other, with brands and marketers seeing a lot of success launching product online and on social platforms without need of support by institutional brands like Allure. The coup of getting a product recommended in the pages of a magazine has been all but replaced by the measurable impact of an influencer posting about a cream or a lipstick on Instagram or YouTube.

So it’s not surprising that Lee is wanting to get ahead of the social game and have Allure do more of what influencer and social media stars do not, like invest in strong visuals and editorial content that’s researched, vetted and fact-checked.

“When it comes to visuals and setting trends, we need to own that,” Lee said bluntly. “When there’s such a wealth of beauty content out there, it can get confusing. We need to be this voice of expertise to cut through the noise.”

And print is still part of Allure keeping it’s authority in beauty. Asked whether the magazine would still be in print in five years, Lee was prepared: “Absolutely.”

“As a brand, we’re committed to it, the company is so committed and there’s a growing interest in beauty,” Lee said. “We’re definitely very invested [in print].”

Given the number of print titles that have closed, at Condé and elsewhere, it’s understandable that Lee would want to drive the point home.

Although print readership is down 6 percent from a year ago, according the most recent data from MPA-The Association of Magazine Media, it seems digital is faring well enough to justify it as a prestige anchor. Desktop web traffic is up 11 percent year-over-year, mobile is up 13 percent and video is up 23 percent. Ad pages are said to be growing as well (possibly helped a bit by the closure of Glamour, which always had beauty ads), with placements for the February issue up 27 percent compared with last year, according to a Condé spokeswoman. She added that ads for March, which has yet to close, are “tracking well.”

Allure also has a something of a side hustle with its subscription Beauty Box business (also getting a “refresh,” including a new “mini-magazine” featuring Allure editors), where the Condé said subscribers grew by 80 percent last year, and a growing e-commerce business, which exceeded its revenue goal by nearly 200 percent.

Susan Plagemann, now chief business officer of Condé’s entire Style category, which Allure falls under, said simply: “Our beauty and wellness businesses are stronger than ever.”

Since Allure is the only beauty-centric property left in Condé’s print arsenal, it’s a good thing.

WWD.com